


A Wonder Woman Film Fixfic

by Golga_Finch_Yum



Category: DC Cinematic Universe, The Horror of the Heights, Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: F/M, Gen, fixfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-08 13:16:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11082369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Golga_Finch_Yum/pseuds/Golga_Finch_Yum
Summary: A Wonder Woman Film fixfic. Since it's fixing the end of the film, SPOILERS. A 7200 word story complete with glowing sky-jellyfish, historical research projects and what Diana likes to do with reporters who try to interview her. May also contain a stealth ship of Steve Trevor/Steve Trevor's Watch.





	A Wonder Woman Film Fixfic

 

            Once she’d arranged the interview, Agent Leslie Dewan had tried to imagine where they might meet. Perhaps Wonder Woman owned one of the large mansions on the outskirts of Paris, with the interior hollowed out and remade into a Grecian temple, and they’d chat by flickering torchlight. Perhaps they’d meet at the Louvre, where she was rumoured to work, surrounded by the beautiful survivors of antiquity. Or perhaps they’d just anonymously step into a cosy café somewhere, one of those tucked down an innocuous side street, a gem known only to the locals. It was Paris, after all.

            Instead, she’d been directed to a refugee camp. Her taxi had driven her all the way out of the city to an old industrial site on which a few prefab cabins and trailer offices had been erected, surrounded by a small sea of one-man tents. The taxi had then stopped several hundred metres away from the edge, and as she reluctantly climbed out the driver warned her that she’d need a different taxi company if she wanted to get picked up around here.

            Feeling exposed, she glanced around before daring to pull out her phone. She hoped, as she had repeatedly on the journey over, that she’d somehow misread Wonder Woman’s email. But no, this was the right address. It even specified where she should go: “behind the largest trailer. It has a big green ‘3A’ painted on the roof.”

            It wasn’t difficult to miss. Even from this distance, the trailer appeared to be slightly vibrating. It was also emitting an audible hum.

            She picked her way towards the cabin. There were wide dirt streets between the lines of tents but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was trespassing with every step. A few of the tents had their occupants, mostly men, sitting outside them, reading phones or staring into space. They glanced up, but no more than briefly. Mostly, they just looked tired. They reminded Leslie of the time she was stuck in Chicago airport for two days due to a snowstorm, the resigned faces of her fellow passengers as they lay among makeshift beds of luggage. Then she felt a stab of embarrassment because it wasn’t the same thing, not at all.

            The big humming trailer turned out to house racks of washing machines and dryers, all feverishly spinning. Other things had been painted on the walls beneath the green 3A, insults in French she was quite glad she couldn’t translate. They’d recently been covered over with white paint, but the letters still showed through.

Behind the trailer was a patch of muddy grass with a large circle of plastic folding chairs. Most of them were occupied by the same kinds of bedraggled people she’d seen outside the tents, all clutching steaming mugs. Some had white paint flecks on their hands. But there was one woman who stood out from the others, and for a few moments Leslie couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.

If she hadn’t been expecting to see Wonder Woman, she wouldn’t have recognized her. Yes, she didn’t think the superhero would come to the interview in her armour – which all photos captured her in – but she wasn’t expecting the bomber jacket or the hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. Or the glasses resting absent-mindedly on her forehead.

_“Bonjour!”_ cried Wonder Woman in a rich contralto, beckoning her over to a vacant chair. _“Asseyez-vous, asseyez-vous. Tout le monde, c’est mon ami Leslie, d’Angleterre.”_

Leslie was greeted with a chorus of _“Bonjour,”_ a few “Hello,” and one of the worst mutilations of “Hah Low Les Lee,” she’d ever heard in her life.

_“Je m’apelle Diana,”_ continued Wonder Woman, and began to point at the other members of the circle. _“Ils sont tout de Syria. Voici Yana, une fermiere, Mais, une edutiante, Ghaith, un chimiste…”_

It went on for quite a while. Leslie, who barely understood a quarter of the words being spoken, quickly lost track. All she could do was marvel at how well Wonder Woman – no, Diana – seemed to know these people. She said their names not as if she was reeling off a memorized list, but as if she was introducing her lifelong friends.

When the names finished, Leslie didn’t know what to say. She felt like she’d walked into the wrong meeting. _“Bonjour,”_ said Leslie uncertainly. She tried to dredge up what little remained of her French from school. “Err… _je ne parlez… ma Francais, ici… petit-pois.”_

Diana laughed. After a moment the others did too. That was another thing Leslie hadn’t expected. Almost all the photos and brief films of Wonder Woman showed her scowling or shouting orders. It didn’t seem that someone like that could be so cheerful.

Then again, the photos and films did tend to be taken when Wonder Woman was in the midst of fighting. And it was a beautiful laugh.

“Forgive me,” Diana said a few moments later; in English this time, though with a light Grecian accent. “We were learning the word _petit-pois_ – peas – only a few minutes ago. Would you like some yerba maté?” Diana raised her steaming mug.

“What? Oh, yes.” This did not ease Leslie’s confusion. She knew maté from a project in South America, and the tobacco-flavoured tea was an acquired taste. A mug was passed around and into her hands. She sniffed it; yes, it was definitely the maté she remembered.

“Thanks,” she said. “But I thought you were all from Syria. How are you all drinking it?”

She’d meant it as an idle question, but to her further embarrassment Diana repeated it in Syrian and there was another round of laughter. The boy with the atrocious English said, “Like tea grows in England!”

“A lot of Syrians travelled to South America in the 1920s, I think, and when they returned home they brought it with them,” said Diana. She patted a fat pile of papers next to her chair. “Now, since our work is done early, we are improving our French. Do you remember any words? Anything at all?”

Dimly, Leslie recalled that she’d flown to Paris for an interview. Being quizzed on the useless facts she’d learned at school was not part of her plan. But as she thought, she remembered something she’d been forced to memorize in class.

“I have a poem?”

“Excellent. Which one.”

_“Le Corbeau et le Renard.”_

“Ah,” said Diana. “Aesop. I loved those stories when I was young.” She turned to the refugees and began speaking to them, presumably in Syrian. Leslie caught the words ‘corbeau’ and ‘renard’ in there, and assumed she was translating. When she was finished she beckoned to Leslie to continue. And Leslie found that, although she’d forgotten most of the meaning, the bounce of the poem meant she could still recall what the words sounded like.

She proceeded phonetically: “Metra Corbeau, sur ern arbra perchay…”

Half an hour later, after Leslie had recited all the Jean de la Fontaine she could dredge up (which was more than she’d expected; evidently some things from school had stayed with her), Diana announced that she had to leave. She went around the circle again, saying a personal goodbye to everyone, while Leslie drained the dregs of her mug and tried to make sense of what had just happened. She’d come out to speak with a superhero on an important matter – while Leslie didn’t technically belong to any government, it was near enough – and instead she’d found herself giving French lessons to a group of refugees.

Clearly Diana had double-booked herself and, not wanting to disappoint either party, had chosen to meet both at the same place. As they walked out of the camp, Leslie asked if this was true.

“Oh, no,” said Diana, carrying the fat stack of papers under one arm. “I remembered you.”

Well, that sunk that idea. “So why did we come out here?”

“Leslie, did you plan to give any charity today?”

“What? No.” A few years ago she’d done the IT for a small conservation group, and once in a great while they’d call and ask her to solve some system meltdown. But aside from her usual Christmas and Children in Need donations, that was it.

“Many people don’t. Your hours are full enough as it is.” She flashed that smile again. “But charity builds up. A little every day adds up to a lot over the decades. So when I meet people, I bring them to places like this so they can do their charity for the day.”

“Like teaching refugees French.”

            “Why not? Speaking it helps them live here.” She tapped the stack of papers under her arm. “Before you arrived I helped them with their applications. I post these, it saves them a little money. If all goes well, they will be citizens of a country again.”

            “I’m just surprised,” said Leslie. “Given your island’s view of letting foreigners in.”

            Diana shrugged. “I left my home to live elsewhere, and now I cannot go back; I have a sense of how it feels. Besides, Leslie _Dewan_ ,” she said, emphasising the surname, “your forebears must have done the same.”

            “Bangladesh,” said Leslie without thinking. “So if you’re concerned about refugees from Syria, why can’t you just go over there and stop the civil war?” Then she realised what she’d just said, and quickly added, “I don’t mean you should! Please don’t tell my boss I suggested you should interfere in another country. I’m really not supposed to do that.”

            “No fear,” said Diana, dismissing her worry. “Even one such as I couldn’t end that war by myself.”

            “You probably could,” said Leslie, deciding that if she wasn’t going to get into trouble, she might as well make the most of it. “I’ve been researching your stint in the First World War. If you hadn’t arrived so close to the Armistice, I bet you could’ve ended that war by yourself.”

            “I doubt it. Besides, man’s weapons have improved a lot since then.” She came to a halt at the side of the road. “Here is where taxis will come to us. It may be a while until one arrives, so feel free to ask your questions now.” As she pulled out her phone and began texting, she said, “You did wish to interview me, yes?”

            “Yes! I mean, yes, yes I did.” Leslie must have interviewed a hundred people in the course of her investigations, and no one had managed to throw her off her script quite so completely as Diana. “In fact, it’s about the First World War.”

            “Is it? Oh good,” said Diana, finishing her text and sending it. “I get so many disappointed scholars of Ancient Greek who think I must know Greece as well as I know Themyscira. So what is it?”

            “It’s about the long-range biplane, the one loaded with Doctor Poison’s gas bombs. The one Steve Trevor flew and destroyed.”

            “Ah.”

            Wonder Woman’s official biography, appearing in the Times after she returned to the public eye, only mentioned Steve Trevor in passing. But Leslie had seen the tribute to Trevor that appeared in the Evening Standard a few days after Armistice Day, written by an anonymous ‘D.P.’, and suspected the biography wasn’t the whole truth.

            “You see,” said Leslie, “there’ve been a lot of dangerous superweapons built during the World Wars and the Cold War, like the Marianas-class submersible and the Schwarzschild Project. My organisation looks for these things and makes sure they’re destroyed or can’t be used by anyone else. And naturally any of Doctor Poison’s creations falls under our purview.”

            “Commendable enough,” said Diana. “But I doubt any of the 1918 gas survived.”

            “It probably didn’t. I’ve seen the photos the Belgians took. You were very, ahem, thorough in destroying that place. But what I’m not sure about is whether the biplane was fully destroyed too.”

            “It was. I saw it explode.”

            Leslie felt like she was stepping onto shaky ground, but pushed ahead regardless. “The thing is, I managed to get hold of the biplane’s schematics. It was an amazing machine – frankly I’m surprised someone managed to build it in 1918 – but it was designed as a light long-range scout. It was never meant to carry bombs, so when General Ludendorff co-opted it for his bombing scheme, this whole extra bomb bay had to be bolted onto the existing fuselage.” She brought up the blueprint on her phone, onto which she’d sketched where the bomb bay had extended to.

            “Now, because this was a last-minute addition – literally last-minute, the mechanics we still blow-torching this together on the runway – it was pretty flimsy, and if Steve Trevor really did fly that plane almost vertically, that would have put a lot of stress on the superstructure. It might have been breaking apart even before the explosion.”

            “You speak of ‘ifs’ and ‘mights’ a lot,” said Diana. She sounded exactly like Leslie’s boss when she’d first pitched the hypothesis to him.

            “There’s more,” she said. “That hydrogen-based gas was highly flammable, but didn’t burn at too high a temperature. Certainly not enough to do much to the biplane’s basic steel structure. So that should have crashed down somewhere, and judging by similar WW1 crashes, it should have impacted in mostly one piece. But as far as I can tell nobody ever mentioned finding the wreckage, even though the air forces would’ve been pretty interested in studying it.

            “So my big question is this, Diana. When you saw the explosion in the sky, are you sure the whole plane exploded?”

            Diana froze. She was silent for almost a minute, eyes unfocused. Leslie tried to imagine having over a hundred years of memories, trying to recall something so traumatic that you kept thinking of it again and again, the memory of what you knew happened gradually overwriting what you actually saw.

            “I do not know,” she said at last. “I’m sorry.”

            “It’s okay,” said Leslie, suddenly feeling an urge to comfort her. “I’ve got other avenues of research. That long-range biplane, shorn of its excess weight, might have made it as far as six hundred miles, almost to the tip of Scotland. That night there were reports of phantom planes being sighted from the French coast and over the North Sea. If one or both of those was the biplane, that might give clues to where it finally came down.”

            “It would be good to find him,” Diana said distantly. Then she saw a taxi emerging from the distance and snapped back to her happy persona, as if her grief had never been visible. “I will do what I can. Show me what you’ve learned so far, and I’ll see if I can fill in any gaps. I may also know a few people who could tell you more than me.”

            “Really?” As far as Leslie knew, Diana was the last surviving veteran of the First World War. As the taxi pulled up, she was struck with a question that had been nagging at her for the past few minutes. “Diana?”

            “Yes?”

            “You said you take everybody who meets you to do charity work. Even ******?”

            “Even him.”

            “You mean you brought him out to a refugee camp? He must have hated that!” Leslie remembered what ****** had said about refugees.

            “Oh, I didn’t take him here.” The taxi pulled up and Diana opened the door, offering Leslie to step in. “That afternoon we cleared up rubbish along the A86 embankment.”

            “Rubbish?” said Leslie. “That seems a little low-key for you.”

            Diana shrugged. “Most of it doesn’t degrade. Either someone picks it up now, or they pick it up in ten or twenty years. It’s prettier to pick it up now.”

#

#

#

            Frankly, Steve was surprised he was still in the air.

            Steve knew planes fairly well. He wasn’t one of those raging propellerheads who knew where every nut and bolt went, but he knew enough to fly in most circumstances. Right now wasn’t most circumstances, although he suspected most propellerheads would struggle with missing the back of the plane.

            Well, most of it. A skeletal tail was still there. Hopefully it remembered how to fly.

            When he’d aimed the biplane to fly almost straight up, he’d done it first to get the gas as far from the ground as possible, and when bomb bay had given way, to try to outfly the fireball blossoming beneath him. Then he was heading upwards because the controls refused to respond. Now, after some coaxing, and leaning out of the seat and giving the side of the fuselage a few good whacks, the plane had settled into a ten-degree angle upwards.

            He tried to remember who held the record for highest height reached in a biplane. He had a sneaking suspicion he was going to break that record soon.

            He could really do with a mechanic around about now. One of those flying aces could probably hang out of his seat, fix whatever was wrong with the stabilizers, figure out a way to fly without most of the tail, and practically rebuild the thing before it landed. Steve did not know how to do any of that. He’d heard the stories of people who had – like the pilot who’d climbed onto the wing and plugged a hole with their own boot, or the gunner who’d inched his way along the fuselage to put out a fire on the tail by hand – and he didn’t mind admitting it terrified him.

            Early on, Steve had contemplated stalling the engines, sending the plane into a crash dive, leaping out with the parachute and trusting to luck. This was stymied by the fact that there was no parachute. He knew British pilots usually flew without them – silk was expensive, reasoned the generals, and besides, a pilot without a parachute was better motivated to find a way to land the plane – but he’d thought the Germans were better equipped.

            There was however an oxygen tank and a mask tucked by his legs. This was a comfort only in that it meant he’d freeze of cold instead of suffocate. Still, at least it increased the likelihood he’d break some kind of height record before he died. Or maybe the engines would fail first. Did the engines need a minimum air pressure to function? Probably, but he had no idea what that was. Right now he’d trade all his years at spy school for ten minutes with a decent aviator.

            He flew higher. He didn’t know how high. The altimeter had been stuck at seven hundred metres feet for… well, he didn’t know how long either. The clock in the cockpit was broken, and he’d handed his watch to Diana before he left. He probably shouldn’t have done that.

            Maybe he could write a note, throw it out, and hope someone found it and sent it to Diana. Unless he was over water. Was he? The compass (at least that still worked) said he was heading north-ish, but he thought he’d been flying for a long time. He was probably over the North Sea by now.

            He decided to write a note anyway. He patted his pockets and discovered he didn’t have anything to write with.

            At this point Steve suspected the air was getting a little too thin. He scrambled for the mask and held it to his face for several frustrating seconds before remembering he had to open the valve on the oxygen tank. It was surprisingly hard to turn. His hand slipped several times. Then it twisted, cool air filled his lungs, and for the first time in several minutes he could think clearly.

            He was still hurtling upwards in a biplane he couldn’t control, but at least it was something.

            Maybe it was worth trying to adjust the horizontal stabilizers by hand. He’d have to climb out of his seat to do it, and after he moved the first one the plane would drunkenly lurch or fall into a death spiral until he moved the other three, but at least it was worth a try.

            He had just unbuckled his seat straps when he saw the light. It was a soft translucent glow, and for a moment he thought he was about to fly into the Aurora Borealis. But this was smaller, more the size of a hot-air balloon, except he could clearly see sky on the other side of it. Like an enormous sky jellyfish. As he looked he saw more of them in the distance; some pale green and some lilac, all with the same indistinctness.

            And then the plane, pressing inexorably upward, drew level then soared above them until they were out of sight, all in a minute or so.

            Looking at the bare sky around him, he suspected they might have been an illusion. If he’d seen them a week or so ago, that’s what he’d have assumed. But after flying through the curtain surrounding Themyscira and emerging into a different world, he was now more inclined to believe such things could happen. After all, if he’d stumbled upon one hidden civilisation by accident, what were the odds that he’d found the only one? And the sky was so vast that it could hide millions of Themysciras and nobody except the occasional pilot would ever know.

            It reminded him of a story he’d read before the war by that Sherlock Holmes fellow. It was about an aviator who, yes, flew too high, and discovered the realm that existed above forty thousand feet. Whole ecosystems flourished up there – air-jungles, he called them – and like any jungle, they were filled with all kinds of animals, from docile herbivores to ever-hungry predators. He returned to the ground, found no-one believed him, then flew back up and promised to bring back proof. His crashed airplane was found at the end of the story.

            Steve didn’t know if he was anywhere close to forty thousand feet, but up here the story felt all too plausible. It was also bitterly cold. For a while he’d been aware of the cooling air around him, but only now did he notice he was gradually growing numb. He tried to flex his hands and they moved reluctantly, as if they were someone else’s.

            There was a sudden quiet, so sudden that Steve mistook it for a loud noise. He looked around, seeing nothing in the sky, before he saw the propeller of the far-right engine was motionless. The biplane lurched to one side, but a minute later the near-left engine also died and that seemed to correct the plane.

            He wondered how far he could glide by wings alone. Not far, he suspected, given the weight of the engines. Still, he must have gone an awfully long way. The plane had been designed to fly to London and back, what, two hundred miles each way? But he must have wasted a lot of fuel with this endless ascent. He tried to calculate where he might be, but he noticed his compass had also broken, the needle now moving freely as the plane tottered left and right.

            The last two engines failed more or less simultaneously. There was a deafening silence as their drone vanished for good, and for a few moments the plane continued upward as if nothing had happened. Then, with the grace of a circus acrobat in the middle of leaping between two trapezes, the plane gradually began to fall.

            Down it plunged. It still had a lot of forwards momentum to it, so the effect was more like a gentle decline, but the mere act of pointing downwards made his crash seem more inevitable than it had before. He tried to think of ways to halt it – maybe the engines had given out from the thinness of the air, and he could restart them if he fell far enough – but every time he tried to gun the engines they failed to respond.

            For one mad moment he considered trying to cut the engines away from the wings, hoping that without their weight he could glide more effectively. He caught himself and inhaled deeply to make sure oxygen was still flowing through the mask. He did so again when he saw lights beneath him, until he remembered the glowing jellyfish he’d seen.

There were more of them now, and there were glowing shapes around them like permanent structures. Maybe he’d passed through a rural farm on his way up and was only now seeing the city of the sky-things. There even seemed to be roads, faint glowing lines in the sky that the jellyfish mostly stayed on.

            One of them was almost directly below him. It was wider the others, and more jellyfish than he’d ever seen surged along it in both directions. This must be a highway, he decided, linking major metropolises. And, judging by his descent, it looked like he was going to crash straight through it. He wondered whether he would hit one of the sky-things, and if it would burst like a balloon or if he would simply glide straight through it.

            Then he wasn’t falling. The rush of air ceased, letting his windburned cheeks rest for the first time in what seemed like hours. The plane hadn’t passed through the glowing highway after all. It had caught him, and now it was gently moving him along like the rest of the jellyfish.

            Well, why not. It made as much sense as anything. He’d already been saved by one hidden civilisation already. Maybe all the hidden ones felt kindly towards crashing strangers.

            It took several minutes for the novelty of not falling to wear off, and at that point he started to wonder what he should do. The engines still wouldn’t start. The highway, though vaguely solid from a distance, was clearly not, as one glance over the side proved. The highway was moving him along at the same speed as all the jellyfish. On the ground, he suspected they were moving far faster than any motor-car could drive; but up here, compared to how fast his plane had been racing through the air, they seemed as slow as thick oozing syrup.

            He smacked his chapped lips. He didn’t have any food up here. Nor any water. He had to admit, of the ways he expected to die in this plane, he’d never even considered starvation.

            At some point he woke up and realised he’d been asleep. The oxygen canister was long empty. He was still drifting along. Every so often a jellyfish would pass him. Once he clambered out onto the wing, trying to find out what they felt like, but all he touched was air.

            He slept and awoke three more times, or possibly four. He had no idea what time it was, and wished he hadn’t given his watch to Diana. Then again, it wasn’t as if there was a ‘day’ hand to help him keep track.

            He tried to speculate where the highway would end. Maybe it would hit the north pole and dive inside, and prove that the hollow earth people were right all along. Maybe it was one big loop around the Earth, and aviators a hundred years later would find his plane still shuttling through the sky. Maybe there really would be a jellyfish metropolis, where a Diana-like jellyfish would find him and rescue him, and disobey her mother and run away with him to the surface. At this stage, they all seemed equally plausible.

            He was asleep when the plane began to fall again. The whistling air woke him up, and he looked upward to see the golden highway winking out above him. So it didn’t go to any destination in particular, or if it did, he’d slept through it. Pity. A jellyfish-Diana would come in handy right now.

            He wondered where the real Diana was, if she’d ever find him. It would’ve been nice to give her some closure.

            He tried the engines, not that they worked. He hit the instruments panel, trying to will the broken dials back into functionality, but that just shattered the glass. He passed through blue, then saw clouds beneath him. Then they were above him, and nothing but blue beneath. Then another vista of whiteness stretched beneath him. That was funny, he thought he’d already passed through the clouds…

#

#

#

            There was once a group of Ancient Greek traders who travelled too far north and became shipwrecked in a land of ice and rock. They named it Hyperborea after the land where the descendants of the North Wind, Boreas, lived. And since the land had tolerable soil, they settled there and so another land became populated. Diana had heard this story from her mother’s knee and took it to be true, but now that she had explored Man’s World she wasn’t sure where Man’s Hyperborea actually was; Iceland, Britain and Sweden were all common theories.

            Still, it seemed a pity those traders never made it any further north, for then they would have found a place that was truly a land of ice.

            The Kord Industries helicopter roared over the Arctic Sheet. “Should be reaching the dig site soon, Diana,” said the pilot next to her, Edvald Bjarmisson. He was a native Icelander, a software designer turned pilot, and had spent much of the flight over discussing how the Cod Wars of the twentieth century were really rooted in Cod Wars of the fifteenth century, and more fundamentally rooted in the dictum “All Englishmen are bastards.”

            Diana had disagreed with this last statement, and over the course of the flight she’d managed to convince Edvald that, no, there were some Englishmen who weren’t total bastards. Most of them, in fact.

            People never failed to surprise her, even though she’d met so many over the past hundred years. It didn’t seem to make mathematical sense. There was only a limited number of personality traits, after all; a limited number of jobs; a limited number of interests; a limited amount of fortune and misfortune in life. And yet, despite these limited factors that made up a person, every single one she’d ever met was perfectly unique. Somehow these similar elements alchemized into true individuality every single time.

            After living on an island where everyone knew everyone, and had known each other for several thousand years, this was perhaps the greatest feature of Man’s World.

            “Thank you,” said Diana, and pulled out her phone. “I’d better let Leslie know I’m nearly there. This stop won’t delay you took much, I hope.”

            “Not at all. These new Kord engines are so good, I could fly circles around your dig site and still make it to Camp Henson in two-thirds the time allocated."

            Diana sent a quick message, then watched as a small blue blot on the horizon – the only patch of colour as far as she could see - gradually grew into a cluster of tents and tarpaulins. A large H in a circle had been scratched into the ice next to one of the snow cats with wide caterpillar treads. If one didn’t look at the surrounding landscape, the place looked like any ordinary construction site.

            The helicopter landed. Diana said her goodbyes to Edvald and stepped out to where Leslie was waiting at the edge of the helipad.

            “Any further news?” said Diana loudly as the helicopter took off.

            “We’re still not sure. We know there’s something down there, we’re just not sure if it’s our plane or an old Norwegian fishing trawler. Sorry, it might’ve been a waste of a trip.”

            “You’re thawing something mysterious out of the Arctic,” reassured Diana. “Given what’s happened in the past, it’s a good idea to have a superhero on standby just in case.”

            “That’s true,” said Leslie. “Now come on out of this wind, and please button up that coat. I didn’t know I could feel any colder, but you’re making me feel it.”

            “Of course,” said Diana, and wrapped her open coat around her bare legs. The icy wind didn’t bother her skin at all, but it tended to disturb people who saw her without winter gear, so she tried to remember to wear it properly.

            Diana hadn’t seen Leslie in several months - not since that meeting in Paris - but they’d exchanged a lot of emails about the biplane. She’d kept in touch with some of the German guards at the airfield; many of them were sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys pressed into service, and when the war was over they’d become some of her first letter correspondents. While all of them had now sadly passed away, their children and grandchildren still owned diaries and memoirs, and some could recite the war stories they’d been told.

These, along with dozens of other clues Leslie had stitched from all kinds of sources, had led her to believe that the biplane was indeed the same one the fishermen in the North Sea had seen. (Judging by the flight plan, the sighting on the coast of France couldn’t have been the biplane, and Leslie had no explanation for it; a ‘boojum’ in aviator parlance.) But the North Sea floor was pretty well explored thanks to oil prospecting, and Leslie was soon looking for the plane at a distance that it shouldn’t have been able to travel by itself. By this point she seemed to want to find the plane primarily to figure out how Steve managed to do it.

Steve. It would be nice to find something of his, like a dogtag or part of his jacket, that she could take back and bury. An empty burial mound felt so impersonal.

Leslie led her underneath the tarpaulin to a wide excavation some fifteen metres deep and almost that much across, circled by a ramp carved into the ice. At the bottom a large ice-cutter, a squat machine on treads that must have been several hundred kilos, was being wheeled up this ramp by a very cold-looking researcher.

“What’s the matter, Erik?” shouted down Leslie.

“Needs to cool down again,” came the muffled reply, followed by swearing as the ice-cutter threatened to slip off the ramp.

Diana leapt down the pit and caught the sliding ice-cutter. Taking it away from a grateful Erik, she lifted it up and carried it out of the excavation. “Where would you like this?” she said.

“Just outside,” said Leslie in a shocked tone, and it occurred to Diana that she’d never had reason to show Leslie her powers in person before.

“Thanks!” squeaked Erik, still panting heavily at the bottom of the ramp. “Needs to cool, probably an hour or so.”

“Hear that?” said Leslie. “We’re standing in the middle of the Arctic, and this piece of junk needs an hour to cool itself down. Good thing I’m not trying to use it at the equator.”

Diana put the ice-cutter down outside and came back under the tarpaulin. She peered at the excavation, but all she could make out was a dim black shadow somewhere below the ice. It might’ve been the right size for a large plane or a small boat or any number of things.

“Well,” said Leslie, “while we wait, want to come inside and have a cocoa?”

Perhaps it was not seeing Leslie since the beginning, but her project had always seemed to Diana an abstract notion, a research parlour game, one that rested on far too many suppositions and hypotheses. It might lead to something, but she hadn’t got her hopes up. But standing there, looking down at the shape in the ice, she realized that she wanted very much to see what it was. She couldn’t wait another hour. Besides, the ice wasn’t that thick.

“Mind if I cut the ice instead?”

Again, Leslie looked confused, as if she’d forgotten Diana was a superhero. “Really? Um… if you like. If you won’t hurt yourself.”

Diana jumped lightly into the pit. The floor was made of tiles of irregular heights from where the ice-cutter had and hadn’t cut. “I’ll be fine,” she said, and flexed her fingers.

Diana had always had raw strength. But it was one thing to punch a hole in a stone tower, and quite another to punch it in such a way that the entire tower collapsed. She’d learned a considerable amount of control over the past century, and ice had been one of her hardest challenges; there hadn’t been any ice on Themyscira, after all.

Even twenty years ago she probably wouldn’t have tried it, for fear of causing too massive a fracture and sending the ice-locked shadow to the bottom of the ocean. But working at the Louvre allowed her to drive up into the Alps whenever she liked, and hike and climb peaks that had only been climbed in the last century, that had defied all attempts by the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Ice was just another unstable battleground, and Diana had been taught to use unstable battlegrounds to her advantage.

She drew her arm back and struck the ice on her knuckles. She didn’t strike hard, more like a test ringing of a newly forged bell to check its soundness. The ice groaned beneath her, and tiny fissures raced out from her impact.

“Well,” said Leslie from above,” that wasn’t so bad.” Diana smiled, and this time she hit the ice with a proper blow.

Tiny stalactites rained from the tarpaulin. Leslie let out a yelp. Erik simply ran outside. Far below them the ice emitted a deep groan of displeasure, but it showed no true signs of fracturing. Diana swept away the pulverised crystals, wormed her fingers into the largest of the fissures and pulled a large chunk of the pit’s floor away.

She didn’t know how long it had taken Leslie’s team to excavate this far down, but Diana doubled the depth in a few minutes. Normally she was more circumspect about reducing people’s accomplishments by superheroic might, but she needed to know. She fractured the ice and tore it up, burrowing deeper until the dim black shadow coalesced into bare metal scaffolding.

“It’s a fuselage,” said Leslie in awe. “I think this is it.”

Diana dug more rapidly, working along the length of the plane. While the tail was burned, the rest of it seemed quite intact. There had to be something of his left here.

And then she saw him, a pinkish blur still sitting in the pilot’s seat. She cleared the ice until just an inch remained and, for the first time in a hundred years, looked into his face. She’d expected a skeleton, a charred corpse, no body at all. What she’d never imagined was that the ice would freeze him, keep him pristine.

There was so much she’d forgotten about his face.

“Diana,” called Leslie, who was still standing at the top of the excavation. “What have you found?”

She couldn’t bring him back. She couldn’t even touch him. Right now he was perfect, but to move him, to chip him out and bring him back from burial, he would ultimately melt. The water would flow and the rot would set in. Decay would shrivel his flesh.

She leapt out of the pit in a single bound, barely glancing at Leslie. “Well?” she began, but Diana said, “Just cover it up. There’s no bombs here, nothing dangerous. Just let the ice keep it.”

She walked out from underneath the tarpaulin and looked up at the bright blue sky, unbroken by any cloud or vapour trail. She imagined the plane gliding through the air, propellers no longer turning, smashing deep into the ice. It must have been a cold day indeed for the water to freeze around the plane as quickly as it did.

As she looked up, she caught a hint of colour in the sky, far beyond the vision of mortals. A tiny ball of lilac impossibly far away.

A boreal. One of the children of Boreas, the North Wind. Somewhere up there lay the land of the boreals, the true Hyperborea, where creatures had lived since Grecian times. A fragment of the old days kept safe from the changing Earth.

Perhaps they had brought him here. Perhaps they plucked him out of the sky and, unable to return him, brought him here where he might stay unharmed. Or perhaps he travelled their roads unwittingly, that it was through no will of the boreals that he came here to freeze.

Either way, it was a sign. Steve couldn’t have been brought all this way just to remain in the ice forever. There had to be a purpose.

She stared at the sky for several minutes, then at the ice. Then she pulled out her phone and dialled a number.

“What is it,” growled a gruff voice. She’d evidently caught Bruce in the middle of his work.

“Mister Freeze,” she said in a calm voice, barely letting herself get excited. “His gun freezes people, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She took a deep breath of Arctic air. “Have you ever found a way to unfreeze people?”

#

#

#

            Steve opened his eyes. He was in a hospital bed. It was all white. It didn’t look like any hospital bed he’d ever seen. Then again, he was happy he’d opened his eyes and didn’t seem to be dead.

            Diana was there. She was wearing the clothes she’d got in London, the grey coat and hat.

            “That was fast,” he croaked. “How did you find me so quickly?” He saw her looking sad and added, “It’s only been a week or two, right? You haven’t even changed your wardrobe.”

            “I brought these out for you,” she said. “Steve, it’s been almost a hundred years. The hundredth anniversary of the Armistice is next year.”

            A hundred years. Considering Steve had assumed he was going to die, that sounded a fair enough trade. Wait; an armistice. “So we ended the war.”

            “That’s right. We helped end it.”

            “So you were right about Ares after all.”

            She shook her head sadly, but it didn’t erode the smile from her lips. “He is gone. War continues, but there is less war than there used to be.”

            He said, “You look exactly the same.”

            “So do you.”

            “I didn’t die. Does this mean I’m an immortal somehow?”

            “No,” she said. She came over to his bed and placed her hand on top of his. He tried to take it but his hand barely moved. “You will live the rest of your life, but you are still a man. Bruce says it will take many months before you can walk again.”

            “There’s no magic healing ray in the future?”

            “I’m afraid not.”

            “So how did I survive?”

            “Either you are very, very lucky or,” she squeezed his hand, “we were fated to reunite. The boreals do not answer.”

            Boreals? He’d have to ask about that later.

Later. He had a later. And a hundred years to catch up on.

“Well,” he said, and his hand gave hers a squeeze like a new-born baby, “I know which one I like the sound of better.”

 

THE END

 

 

 

In the tradition of most superhero films putting their titles at the end, you have been reading:

 

ANOTHER STEVE IN THE ICE

By Golga_Finch_Yum

 

Written in sixteen hours, posted two days after seeing the film on Opening Thursday.


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